Questing for a combined blog and wiki

Despite the summer inertia I have managed to do some thinking about development of this blog and other older sites, and I've come to the conclusion I really need a combination of blog and wiki. I'll use the blog to do short newsy pieces, and the wiki for longer articles with decent menus. The flexibility of this arrangement, and its simplicity of use, will of course then allow me to pull in the best of material from the Partnerships Online and Making the Net Work sites, and easily add to the heap in ways that are creative, productive and navigable. It's really so obvious someone will have done it already, and there'll be plenty of guides or even hosted packages. So I thought.

In practice it is proving difficult to find a workable solution, probably because of my rather limited tech development skills. Or maybe I'm trying to do something unusual.
Anyway, here's a little of what I found in case it is of use to others on the same quest ... or even better prompts someone to offer a solution, commercial or otherwise. I should say that I'm also discussing this with my inventive friends at Headshift, who I know have some of the answers. We may have cracked it by next week, in theory anyway. Meanwhile, on the basis that I never really know what I mean until I write it down, this is by way of refining the brief. Heath warning: do not construe any of what follows as advice or even significant insight.... I'm just exploring.
The current situation is that I'm using the hosted Typepad service for this blog, and others, and this has worked really well for me over the past year. There's plenty of flexibility in design and features, support is excellent, and for about £10 a month I can run this blog and set up others for specific projects. I've blogged a British Council seminar, reported on Wales Spatial Plan consultation, and supported a team advising Government on nonprofit governance. I've also set up blogs for private team workspaces.
I have also used the service provided by Editme to set up wikis, and particularly like the way templates provide simple ways of developing and changing sidebar menus. The result is easy to edit, and looks like a standard web page rather then a wiki ... which is helpful for most site users and contributors,
However, I'm blocked on a couple of fronts.
The first is that quite a few of my blog pieces turn into articles that I would like to organise within a better navigation system than a blog offers. I'm sure that attention to the finer points of Movable Type (which underlies Typepad) would enable me to create better sidebars with links to articles, but it seems a bit limited. I want to have more control over formatting, to offer wiki editing options to other sites users, I don't necessarily want everything that I add to the site to feature as a main column blog item.
The second is that I increasing want to use new content tools like blogs and wikis at workshops, seminars and conferences where there may not be online access, or it may be slow. That means I can't use a hosted service on those occasions. I want to set up a blog/wiki using a Powerbook as server, wirelessly networked with others, develop content collaboratively with others at the event, and then move the site online afterwards. Making technology an integral part of the event is different from blogging it afterwards, or even collaborative note-taking using Subethanet (though that may be part of it).
On the first front I could, I suppose, just run a blog and wiki side by side, integrated by the general look and feel and well thought-out navigation. I could do that on two hosted services, or by enlisting the help of someone with more skills than me in blog and wiki software, and hosting the two on one server. I have looked at Bloki, which launched as a blog/wiki solution last year, but it doesn't appear to be thriving and is still in beta.
Then there is the matter of running a blog or wiki on a local network at events. It might make sense to use the same solution as my main site. From past experience - and what others seems to be doing - a wiki seems the way to go. It's easy to blog an event, but you end up with a heap of stuff that's difficult to navigate. Contributors post separate items rather than collaborating on session reports and co-edited pages. The same issue arises on team workspaces, where wikis seem to be the favoured tool. Socialtext is well promoted, but looks a bit expensive for my needs. I want to do something that I could also recommend to nonprofit clients.
Editme used to sell licences, but don't any more, so that route is closed for offline. One serious commercial possibility is CourseForum, which does offer licences. Pages could later be transferred to my online server or their hosting services. However, I'm not sure I could customise the look and feel sufficiently to integrate with my other content unless I went for their more expensive ProjectForum. It could be a solution for events but I might have to use something else for my main blog/wiki.
Perhaps the place to start is to reflect on what's going to be the main way I handle content in future - crafted web pages using Dreamweaver, quick pages using a wiki, with contributions from others, or blog? Where will I put picture galleries and videos as I do more multi-media work?
One thing I'm pretty sure about: I won't update conventional web sites, so wiki/blog looks the main way to go. I suspect that I may find hosted services constraining. It looks like I need a customised package that will work offline and can be transferred to my own server space. Pmwiki looks promising, run on my Powerbook for events, then a version side by side with a blog online. The PMwiki site says that it is the wiki used by Smart Meeting Design, one of the few groups I've found who are really trying to integrate a wide range of tools with face-to-face facilitation.
I have added other resources I found to a previous item on blog and wiki resources and will report again on how my quest turns. May even have something to show for it.

Comments

[David Brake]

You might consider looking at WordPress - possibly not for yourself as Typepad seems to be suiting you at the moment - but for other blog-seeking non-profits. It is open source and free for one thing, and allows you to make individual posts private and to have sub-categories as well as categories. I hope to move to it myself one of these days when the guy hosting my existing installation manages to 'throw the switch' and move my blog across.

[Martin Dudley]

I am using Moveable Type which is a paid for, locally installed yet not identical version of Typepad. Take a look at an early incarnation at http://bishopthorpe.net/mt/crossroads. It tries to deal with filed and moving information. Would run on your lapmac I guess. You can edit look and feel and functionality using some html, though it can have knock on effects.